Cave

How to spell cave

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cave

What does cave mean?

1. nounA natural underground hollow or chamber, usually with an opening in a hillside or cliff.
2. verbTo collapse inward, or to give way and surrender under pressure (usually with 'in').

Cave in a sentence

• noun

  The hikers sheltered inside a dry cave until the storm passed.

• verb

  The old mine roof could cave in without warning.

• noun

  Ancient paintings cover the walls of the limestone cave.

• verb

  Managers refused to cave to the union's first demands.

Where does cave come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin cava, the feminine form of cavus, meaning 'hollow' or 'hollowed out'. The same root produced the verb cavare, 'to hollow out', and survives in relatives such as 'cavity', 'excavate', and 'concave', all of which share the idea of an empty space scooped out of something solid. English took the word during the 1200s from Old French, where cave already meant a cellar or underground chamber. The figurative phrase 'to cave in', meaning to collapse inward and later to surrender under pressure, grew up much later, possibly reinforced by a regional English dialect word, but the underlying image of a hollow giving way fits the Latin sense perfectly. The plain four-letter spelling rarely causes trouble, since the silent final 'e' simply signals the long 'a' that the vowel already suggests.

How the word is built

• cave (from Latin cava: a hollow); a single unbroken root with no prefix or suffix